I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

Alcoholism, tobacco, drunk driving, these things will always be with us. There's always going to be a certain percentage of any population that is addicted to certain substances.

I think one of the problems with being a fiction writer these days is that you can't keep up with the headlines. Things that people would say are absurd occur the next day or they come out of somebody's mouth. There are days I just wanna give up.

With a 660-page book, you don't read every sentence aloud. I am terrified for the poor guy doing the audio book. But I do because I think we hear them aloud even if it's not an audio book. The other goofy thing I do is I examine the shape of the words but not the words themselves. Then I ask myself, "Does it look like what it is?" If it's a sequence where I want to grab the reader and not let the reader go then it needs to look dense. But at times I want the reader to focus on a certain word or a certain image and pause there.

Shane Salerno and I adapted my book Savages together, and I learned a lot about adaptation. I think it's an extremely difficult thing to do; adaptation might even be more difficult than writing an original screenplay. It's so much a matter of choices, making choices of what to leave in. It was an education.

I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

We need to do something about gun violence in America. But every time one of these things happen, we say the same thing, and then we don't seem to be able to do anything. And that needs to change.